WeatherNode

WeatherNode is a self hosted weather dashboard for your personal weather station. It combines live station readings with external data like forecasts, alerts, radar, air quality, astronomy, and more.

I built WeatherNode for my own station first. I wanted a dashboard that loads fast, stays usable during API outages, and lets me choose where the data comes from. Once it worked well enough for daily use, I decided to share it so you can run it too.

Screenshots

The public dashboard — live station readings, the current forecast, and the day's trends:

Precipitation radar	Community stations map

The admin panel — a dashboard with live ingest stats and station status, and settings to configure dozens of data sources, sensors, widgets and themes:

More pages

WeatherNode has dedicated pages for each data source — a few more:

Forecast	Satellite

Statistics & records	History

Air quality	Fire weather

Pollen forecast	Aviation / METAR

Tides	River levels

Noise level	Astronomy

Live demo running a real station: meteouitgeest.nl

If you are setting up a server, start with HOSTING.md to choose the right setup for your situation (VPS, shared hosting, or Docker), then follow DEPLOYMENT.md for the step-by-step install.

Support

Documentation

• Admin guide, ADMIN_GUIDE.md. Use this if you run the site.
• User guide, USER_GUIDE.md. Use this if you visit the site.
• Hosting guide (start here to choose a setup), HOSTING.md
• Deployment guide (step-by-step install), DEPLOYMENT.md
• Shared hosting quickstart (no server npm), SHARED_HOSTING_QUICKSTART.md
• Development guide, DEVELOPMENT.md
• Versioning guide, VERSIONING_GUIDE.md
• Release runbook (commit/build/release flow), docs/RELEASE_RUNBOOK.md
• GitHub (source control and releases), GITHUB.md
• Changelog, CHANGELOG.md
• Telemetry aggregator notes, docs/AGGREGATOR_SERVICE.md
• License, LICENSE.txt
• Trademarks, TRADEMARKS.md

Where the details live

This README stays focused on what WeatherNode is and what you get. Detailed server setup lives in DEPLOYMENT.md. Detailed admin operations live in ADMIN_GUIDE.md.

Features

🌡️ Live station data

• Live station readings from Ecowitt, WeatherFlow, WeatherLink, Ambient Weather, Wunderground, and local file sources.
• Per card timestamps so you see when each data source last updated.
• Sensor health detection and OFFLINE badges when a source goes stale.
• Optional alert notifications when fetching or saving fails.

🌤️ External data

• Forecast sources include Yr.no, OpenWeatherMap, Weather Underground, Environment Canada, and Wxsim.
• Weather alerts support multiple providers by region.
• Air quality from WAQI and Sensor.Community.
• Aurora, ISS passes, astronomy calculations, earthquakes, and METAR.

🗺️ Pages

• Radar and satellite pages.
• Forecast, air quality, astronomy, earthquakes, lightning, and pressure map pages.
• History and statistics pages.
• Community stations map.

🧰 Admin and operations

• Admin panel for data sources, widgets, appearance, effects, mail, and updates.
• In app updater with preview, backups, and rollback.
• Cache first public site. WeatherNode updates data in the background and serves public pages from cache.

🎨 Customization

• FX and Flat visual modes, with WeatherNode, Ocean, Forest, and Solar Flare colour palettes and visitor-selectable light/dark/system modes.
• Admin drag and drop widget ordering on the dashboard.
• Optional visual effects like rain, snow, wind, lightning, and fog.

🌐 Locale and units

• Language and unit defaults set by the site admin.
• Optional browser based locale and region detection, with fallback to the site defaults.

🔐 API and security

• JSON API is protected by API keys. You manage keys at /admin/api-keys.
• Authentication, endpoints, response details, and integration examples are documented in docs/API.md.
• Optional secure push mode for Ecowitt receivers.

📡 Community telemetry

• Optional station telemetry upload to a community aggregator.
• Community stations map page, if you enable telemetry.

🤖 Optional AI

• Built in forecast narrator.
• Optional AI rephrasing for forecast text, off by default.

Requirements

• PHP 8.2 or newer.
• SQLite or MySQL.
• Composer.
• Node.js and npm for building frontend assets.

Quick start for local development

git clone https://github.com/centauri/WeatherNode.git
cd WeatherNode
composer install && npm install
cp .env.example .env && php artisan key:generate
php artisan migrate && php artisan db:seed
php artisan admin:create
npm run build && php artisan serve

Open your site and sign in at /admin using the admin account you created with php artisan admin:create.

Local development helpers

composer run setup
composer run dev
composer test

Admin bootstrap

php artisan db:seed seeds system settings. Create your first admin account with:

php artisan admin:create

For automation, use non-interactive flags:

php artisan admin:create --email=admin@example.com --password="strong-password" --name="Administrator"

After login, users can change their own password from /profile. If you lose admin access, use php artisan admin:fix-access <email> --password="new-strong-password".

Deployment

DEPLOYMENT.md covers production setup, cron, storage permissions, and web server configuration. For in-app updater behavior (what it runs and what it does not), see the "In-app updater command behavior" section in DEPLOYMENT.md. If you do not have Node.js/npm available, use SHARED_HOSTING_QUICKSTART.md for a no-npm deployment flow.

Docker container

WeatherNode is also available as a Docker image (published on GitHub Container Registry):

docker pull ghcr.io/centauri/weathernode:latest

Recommended Docker setup (compose-first):

git clone https://github.com/centauri/WeatherNode.git
cd WeatherNode
# Edit docker-compose.yml: set APP_URL and APP_KEY
php artisan key:generate --show
make docker-up

The container startup runs migrations automatically. On first startup it also runs one-time bootstrap (storage:link, db:seed, and optional admin:create when ADMIN_EMAIL + ADMIN_PASSWORD are set in docker-compose.yml). If you leave ADMIN_EMAIL / ADMIN_PASSWORD empty, create the first admin account in the browser at /setup/admin (available only while no users exist).

Log in and WeatherNode asks where the station is and where its readings come from, with a map for the coordinates. It ships knowing nothing about any particular place, so this is the one thing it needs before the weather pages mean anything. It takes a minute and can be put off.

For a friendlier startup check flow, use:

make docker-up

If you changed Docker build files, rebuild with:

make docker-rebuild

For full Docker usage (including the scheduler container), see DOCKER.md.

Release artifacts: why no ZIP on normal push?

A normal commit + push to main only builds/publishes the Docker image (latest). The deploy ZIP (weathernode-deploy.zip) is created only for tag pushes (v*), for example:

git tag v2026.05.1
git push origin v2026.05.1

AI features

WeatherNode can generate short forecast text. It uses a built in narrator. You can enable optional AI rephrasing for that text, it is off by default. Configuration lives in config/nlg.php and the related environment variables. If you enable AI rephrasing, the app may send forecast text to the configured provider.

Developer utilities

make clean
make release

make release expects a plain text/Markdown changelog bullet (raw HTML tags are rejected).